Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera / August 22, 2024
The congresswoman stands in a great tradition of resisting oppression and empire, in a nation terrorized by lobbies sabotaging its democratic integrity.
When US Congresswoman Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, raised her voice earlier this month and defiantly declared, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down!”, she added her voice to a long history of bold and rebellious battle cries that have echoed throughout American and world history.
Bush ran for re-election to her seat in the US Congress this year, but she lost the Democratic primary to Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney of St Louis County.
The loss, to a significant degree, was because the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent millions of dollars on ensuring her defeat, after she dared to speak openly against the Israeli genocide in Palestine.
Bush was the second member of the so-called “Squad” to be roundly defeated in a Democratic primary in 2024, following Jamaal Bowman of New York, yet another outspoken US Congressman who objected to the slaughter of Palestinians and sought to protect the best interests of the American people.
Zionists do not like Americans who keep the best interests of the American people in mind, and who speak up and say their Israeli emperor has no clothes on. They seek to silence, subdue and ultimately run out of town anyone daring to challenge the parts of the establishment they have bought and paid for to speak on behalf of their favourite settler colony.
It is in this besieged country that Bush dared to stand up and declare: “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down!”
This was not just her speaking truth to money and power. This was the cry of an entire people terrorized by the wealth and power of a colonial project sabotaging the democratic aspirations of a nation.
Words of defiance
In the long and enduring history of African-American defiance against racism, the forces of white supremacy and obscene wealth and power have mobilized to silence it. Battle cries have often marked this resistance.
Perhaps Malcolm X’s legendary phrase during the heat of the 1960s civil rights movement – “by any means necessary” – best exemplifies such battle cries.
“We declare,” Malcolm X said in a rousing speech in 1964, “our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
A year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr’s refrain “I have a dream” became definitive to the entire course of the American civil rights movement.
Delivered to a massive audience in Washington, DC, on 28 August 1963, the speech galvanized those who heard it in person and inspired generations of Americans committed to racial equality.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” King told the crowd. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
But this dream has not yet been realized, at a time when Cori Bush’s aspirations to serve her community have been thwarted by power and wealth beyond her reach, at the service of a foreign settler colony.
We can travel around the tapestry of African-American history and hear the same outcry.
James Baldwin’s defiant phrase, “I am not your negro!”, summarized an entire history of slavery, on the basis of which the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck made a mesmerizing documentary.
“Because I am not a negro,” Baldwin declared, in a gentle but fearsome tone, “I am a man. But if you think I am a negro, it means you need it.”
Commitment to justice
When Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted to go to war in Vietnam, he spoke to the same themes.
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home,” Ali said on 20 June 1967, refusing to join what he believed to be a genocide in Vietnam, “and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”
More than a century earlier, an equally iconic phrase, “Ain’t I a woman?”, was uttered in a speech by former slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.
“That man over there,” she said famously, “says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
“Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? … I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
The list goes on, into other cultures and other languages and other just causes.
In Palestinian cultural history, when Mahmoud Darwish began his legendary poem Identity Card with the phrase, “Sajjil Ana Arabi/Write it down, I am an Arab”, he declared the defiance of an entire nation against subjugation and dispossession.
When Mahatma Gandhi penned his Hind Swaraj or “Indian Home Rule” in 1909, when Nelson Mandela declared, “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”, when Cubans sang Hasta Siempre, Comandante for Che Guevara, when the Irish declared “tiocfaidh ár lá/our day will come”, when Karl Marx wrote “workers of the world unite” – all of these words played a key role in the global fight for justice.
Nefarious outfits
How does US Vice President Kamala Harris, deeply committed to Israel and AIPAC, look in light of Cori Bush’s battle cry, her emphatic declaration of defiance?
In the season that Harris might be poised to repeat for a black woman what Barack Obama did for a black man, and where she has remained subservient to the Israeli lobby, Bush’s bold and beautiful defiance stands as a bright question mark against the vice president.
As for the substance of Bush’s declaration, two prominent US political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, have already thoroughly documented in their landmark 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, the notorious Zionist apparatus of power relentlessly at work against the best interests of the American people.
The Israel lobby does this by steering US foreign policy in favour of Israel; senselessly repeating the charge of antisemitism, not where it is badly needed, but to silence anyone who disagrees with their plots; and systematically seeking to control the public debate about occupied Palestine.
To be sure, AIPAC is not the only rich and powerful reactionary outfit making a mockery of so-called “American democracy”.
The fossil fuel industry, destroying the planet; and the gun lobby, opposing legislation to put an end to the mass slaughter of Americans, stand shoulder to shoulder with AIPAC as lobby groups advocating for specific, myopic, but overwhelmingly rich and powerful constituencies.
AIPAC just wants military and political support for the genocidal Zionism that runs the garrison state of Israel. That is all.
The fossil fuel lobby wants to make sure the climate calamity does not impact the profit margins of oil and gas companies. The gun lobby advocates for free and open access to assault weapons, no matter how many innocent people are killed by mass murderers on a steady scale.
Indeed, there is a constellation of such nefarious outfits effectively running the US. We should not single out any one of them.
We must put them all together to see how they are safeguarding a global spectrum of militant imperialism, genocidal colonialism and predatory capitalism.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he teaches Comparative Literature, World Cinema, and Postcolonial Theory
